This book had its beginnings in a
paper I published in Translation and
Literature, 20:2, 2011 ,
pp. 175-190, entitled '"O that mine Adversary had written a book!"
Translations of Catholic Literature and the Eroticization of Pain in
Seventeenth-Century England'. That paper focused on two main
texts:1. Baltasar Gracián, El
Criticon: Primera Parte: En la Primavera de la Niñez y en elEstio de la Juventud (Madrid,
1651), translated into English by Paul Rycaut as The Critick (London, 1681). The
eroticism of the Spanish text - which depicts beautiful women
capturing, binding and torturing travellers - is a metaphor for the
temptations that befall on us as we journey through this world.
In the English translation, however, the tale loses much of its moral
dimension. Rycaut was not a Catholic, and his treatment of the text
testifies to profound differences between Catholic and Protestant
discourse; sexually charged descriptions of women who captivate and enthral and inveigle
their victims into complicity in their own
humiliation have no place in Protestant religious discourse, and in
Rycaut's hands the text loses much of its moral dimension and becomes
mostly a form of voyeuristic entertainment. 2. Vicenzo Puccini's biography of Magdalena de
Pazzi, Vita della Veneranda Madre
Suor Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (Florence, 1611), translated
anonymously into English as Life of
the Holy and Venerable Mother Suor Maria Maddalena de Patsi (Saint
Omer, 1619), with a preface by the Catholic convert Toby Matthew. A
Protestant translation, Life of Magdalene of Pazzi (London,
1687), based on a biography compiled from Puccini and other
sources, appeared towards the end of century. Both English translations -
like Puccini's Italian original - contain numerous episodes describing
the penances and humiliations of Magdalena in terms that would really
only be seen in modern writing in pornographic literature. The earlier,
Catholic, translation presents this material, along with accounts of
miracles and visions, in all seriousness, and Matthew recognizes that
it runs counter to Protestant perceptions:

How many
painefull disciplines,
rude hairecloaths, hungry meales, sad nights, bitter
sighs and salt teares, did she with a noble & faythfull hart
endure, send forth, and
shed? And all in vaine, if it should be true which Protestants affirme,
that fayth only
iustifyeth... (sig. ***2v)

The copy in British Library actually carries the words 'O that mine Adversary had written a
book!' on the flyleaf in an early hand, indicating that its Catholic
reader recognized that the book was more likely to
alienate Protestants than win converts to the Catholic cause. Thomas
Smith's 1687 Protestant translation is premised on the same perception
- that the book is so plainly absurd from a Protestant point of view
that it can be published and presented to Protestant readers so that
they can se how the Catholics condemn themselves out of their own
mouths.

By the time I came to work on Pain,
Pleasure and Perversity, then, I already had a clear sense of
the profound differences between Catholic discourse and Protestant
discourse on the subject of suffering. I began by
developing that point, looking at translations of an erotically-charged
passage from Jerome, in which a Christian (in order to destroy his
spirit) is bound and left on a soft bed in a beautiful garden, where he
is approached by a beautiful courtesan, who starts to strangulate him
while arousing him to an erection. She mounts him, but - as she
bends to kiss him - he bites his tongue off and spits it in her face;
as the Catholic translation of 1630 has it, 'the sense of lust, was
subdued, by the sharpenes of that payne which succeeded' (Jerome, 'The
Life of Saint Pavl the Hermite', trans. from the Latin [by Henry
Hawkins?], in Certaine Selected
Epistles of Saint Hierome, Saint Omer, 1630, p. 9). Examining
early modern translations of this tale into various European languages,
I found that, while all of them suppressed certain aspects of the
story, there was a clear split between Catholic translations, which
rendered most of the details of the story, and Protestant versions,
which used far more circumlocution. The paradigm began to develop of a
more exuberant southern/Latin/Catholic discourse versus
northern/Germanic/Protestant discourse, with its greater tendency to
dispassion, to ‘rejoice’ unsmilingly in suffering, and to broach the
topic of sex furtively or not at all. Looking at other examples of
early modern hagiography, this basic difference in discourse structure
was thrown ever more into relief.

I then decided I wanted to look at the way in which Protestant
anti-Catholic polemic responded to the less inhibited discourse of the
South. An early form of sexual flagellant - which came to be known in
England as the 'flogging cully' had already emerged, but, contrary to
what I had been led to expect from my reading of
recent scholarship on the subject, I found that, during the early part
of
the seventeenth century, Protestant attacks on Catholic practices of
penance did not carry a subtext of sexual innuendo. To put it simply,
rather than suggesting that they got a kick out of flagellating
themselves, their ridicule was more along the lines of "They deserve to
be whipped because they're naughty boys!" It was not until the later
part of the seventeenth century that it became common to suggest that,
far from subduing lust by whipping themsleves, Catholics were actually
provoking it. And, even when that did become a feature of Protestant
perceptions of Catholic penance, it appears that the sources for such a
view were nearly all products of southern Latin discourse - partly
romance, with its endless permutations of themes of dominance and
submission, of tormentors and victims, and partly proto-pornography
(notably Nicholas Chorier's Satyra
Sotadica, 1660, and Jean Barrin, whose Venus dans le Cloitre, Cologne,
1683, was translated and published the same year in London as Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in her
Smock).

At this point, I started to conceive the final shape of the book: Part
I on 'The Suffering Self', Part II on 'The Suffering of Others', and
Part III on 'Suffering and Gender'. To complete the first part of the
book, I turned to seventeenth-century attitudes towards Stoicism and
Epicureanism and examined the attitudes of Protestants (particularly
puritans) towards suffering. Then I developed the middle section on
attitudes towards cruelty and the spectacle of suffering, again finding
significant differences between southern/Latin/Catholic and
northern/Germanic/Protestant discourse.

I made extensive use of the Early English Books Text Creation
Partnership in writing this book, which gave me a very broad range of
texts to draw on. The number of writers who gain a brief mention is too
great to mention but, in addition to the writers already mentioned,
there is significant reference to Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Samuel
Butler, Pedro de Ribadeneira (biographer of Ignatius Loyola), Thomas
Nash, Daniel Pratt (author of a curious biography of St. Agnes) and
Mary Wroth. For more information about the book and issues related to
seventeenth-century attitudes towards suffering, see my book blog.